Nobody remembers who opened the book first. Perhaps it was already waiting for her beneath the ancient arch, its pages filled with stories that were never meant to remain between covers. With every page, another red thread finds its way into the world. It crawls across stone, slips through forgotten places and binds one story to another. The child knows the book is not meant for small hands. The raven knows better than to ask. Beyond her, the city remains strangely still. Yet the red web continues to grow, as if every word she reads gives it another path to follow. She keeps reading. Because somewhere within the red web, something has begun to read her back. A digitally composed artwork rooted in physical painting, expanded through AI generation and refined with manual post processing.